Harmony at Chevy in the Hole: Two choirs create one voice at abandoned GM site

The Flint City Wide Choir rehearses at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Flint. Courtesy

FLINT, MI -- Two groups symbolizing different portions of Flint
history are joining to raise
their voices for the city's future at one of Flint's most blighted areas.

The Flint
City Wide Choir, a collaboration of 50 Flint church choirs, and the Flint
Male Chorus, a group of singers descending from an in-house Chevrolet singing
group, will perform together at the former auto manufacturing plant site of Chevy
in the Hole at 4 p.m. April 27.

"I know that almost every week there's something negative
that happens," said Delores Roberts, co-founder and president of the Flint City Wide Choir. "When
the choirs get together, it just does something for their spirit."

The performance is a preview of the upcoming Free City art festival May
3- 5 at the same location, where artists from the city, state and throughout
the world will come together to share ideas and art about how to reclaim and
reuse places such as Chevy in the Hole.

While the project is all about Flint, it started
with an artist in the south Bronx.

When New York artist Laura Napier heard of the call for
projects to the Free City festival, she started researching Flint. She came
across a post on the Flint Expatriates blog where she learned about the Flint Male
Chorus, and it was exactly the kind of thing she was looking for.

"A lot of my work is finding communities that existed at
certain places that don't exist anymore," she said.

The Flint Male Chorus is exactly that.

The chorus began in the 1940s as the
Chevrolet-Flint Male Chorus and was composed almost entirely of employees of the Chevrolet
Manufacturing Division of General Motors in downtown Flint. While the name
changed, over the years the group survived, even if plants at Chevy in the
Hole.

"It was originally just guys who worked in the factories, and now, not so much. Most of the guys are retired, but they come from all walks of life," said Matt Packer, who directs the chorus.

That was what Napier said she found so fascinating.

"I thought that was really interesting that that social structure
can survive. The factory closed, a lot of people lost their jobs, but the Flint
Male Chorus decided to keep on going," Napier said. "It's amazing."

Jerome Chou, director of programs for the Flint Public Art Project, which is
organizing the event, said Napier's idea was the perfect fit for the festival
that is combining all kinds of art – from traditional music, theater and visual
art to carnival rides made out of recycled car parts.

"We love this project because it's everything the festival
is about," he said. "It's also
everything Flint Public Art Project is about. ... Without this project, Laura
would never have come to Flint, the City Wide Chorus never would have met the
all-Male Chorus. It's about making those connections."

While Napier was excited for her initial idea to involve the
Flint Male Chorus, after some more research she decided she needed to take it
one step further.

"I found the Chevrolet choir and I was really excited, but
everyone lives in the suburbs, so I really wanted to bring in a group that
lives all across Flint," she said. "I was thinking about the church communities
because the church communities are really involved with a lot of things. It's a
different kind of social organization and very strong."

She found the Flint City Wide Choir.

"I was excited just to know that someone had even heard about
us. It just melted my heart, it really did," Flint City Wide Choir's Roberts said.

As the co-founder of the group, you could argue she had the
idea first.

Almost exactly 10 years ago, she got the idea. Having grown
up in Flint in the '60s, remembering times before people had bars on windows
and only locked their screen doors at night, Roberts wanted to do something to
unite the city.

Music was the obvious answer.

It began with 72 members from 14 churches. Now, the chorus is
250 members strong involving 50 churches. She said she expects more than 70 members to
be at the April 27 performance.

She said she's excited to expand that collaboration even
more.

"I'm telling you, everything just went beautifully," she
said when the two groups met to rehearse. "They received us well and they were
received well at our rehearsal. It was just a loving atmosphere."

The Flint City Wide Choir sings mostly gospel music while
the Flint Male Chorus sings a variety of barbershop, standards, and other kinds of music.
Delores said she enjoys hearing them together.

"There’s the race thing as well," said the Flint Male Chorus' Packer. "We’re a primarily Caucasian group and they're mostly an African American group and it’s great from that aspect as well."

Chou visited one of the City Wide Choir's rehearsals.

"Just the power they're able to generate really blew me away,"
he said. "I got goose bumps imagining what's going to happen when you take that
out to the Chevy site where nothing like that has ever happened before."

The Flint Male Chorus won't be at the festival due to a
prior engagement, but Chou said he's glad they'll have the opportunity to
perform at the site beforehand, on April 27.

Following the performance, at 5 p.m., Los Angeles-based
artist James Rojas will be leading a free group activity in which community
members will wander the site and then make models for future uses of the site
out of a variety materials like popsicle sticks and plastic egg shells.

Rojas, who went to school for urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has
done projects like it in the past – including one at Kettering in 2012 – and said
it's interesting to see what people come up with.

"When you give them these non-urbanizational objects, people
have the opportunity to be more creative," he said.